Java 9, a major release of the standard Java platform that was planned for September 2016, is now likely to be postponed by six months.

In an openjdk mailing list post this week, Oracle's Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group, blamed the delay on complexities in developing modularization, which improves scalability and performance and is based on Project Jigsaw. "We've made good progress on Jigsaw over the last eighteen months," wrote Reinhold. But the current JDK (Java Development Kit) 9 feature complete milestone is set for December 10, and Jigsaw "needs more time."

"The JSR 376 EG (expert group) has not yet published an Early Draft Review specification, [but] the volume of interest and the high quality of the feedback received over the last two months suggests that there will be much more to come, and we want to ensure that the maintainers of the essential build tools and IDEs have adequate time to design and implement good support for modular development."

Thusly, Reinhold is proposing a six-month extension of the JDK 9 schedule, postponing general availability until March 2017 and moving the feature complete milestone to May 2016. "As with previous schedule changes, the intent here is not to open the gates to a flood of new features unrelated to Jigsaw, nor to permit the scope of existing features to grow without bound."

If no reasoned objections are raised by next Tuesday, December 8, this new schedule would be adopted. The December 8 deadline also holds if objections are raised and satisfactorily answered.